Stephen Booth - One Last Breath

‘But there was no reason for you to worry yourself,’ said Quinn. He slid the bolt back into the trigger mechanism and released the safety. ‘Not once they’d got me sent down.’

‘Listen,’ said Alan, trembling now with cold and fear, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got this all wrong. What I told you in Gartree — that was true. There weren’t any other men with Mum at the same time as you. I really am your son. I’m a bastard, but I’m your bastard. You can’t do this to me.’

But Quinn just shook his head.

‘You should start running now,’ he said.

Ben Cooper knew the two men weren’t far ahead of him. But his leg wouldn’t support him any more, and he could only drag himself a few inches at a time through the darkness. He’d be glad now even to see a glimmer of Mansell Quinn’s light stick, though he was sure Alan Proctor must have come into the cavern with a lamp. He craved any kind of light.

The words the men spoke were hardly penetrating Cooper’s brain. But phrases stuck in his mind, and he knew they had meaning. The Coke bottle he remembered. Somebody had wiped the fingerprints from it — wasn’t that it? So had they been Alan Proctor’s fingerprints, not Simon’s? Quinn had remembered Simon playing U2 in the house. But Alan was a fan of the band, too. He had their CDs in his rack.

Cooper gasped with the pain, but almost laughed at the same time. ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. It had been playing in the background when he phoned Alan. What day had that been? Back when he still thought of Alan Proctor as Alistair Page, anyway. And that was something else funny — Will Thorpe had almost told them the truth before he was killed. It was Alan who’d made a new life for himself. He’d even changed his name.

The voices had stopped. Cooper tried to listen, but could hear only his own breathing. And then there was a loud snap and something whistled over his head. Then he heard a crack and clatter as it began to ricochet violently between the walls of the passage behind him.

The echo hadn’t died away before there was a second snap , followed by a dull thump and a slap, like a butcher’s cleaver slicing a piece of steak.

Cooper kept his head down. If he’d been standing upright, the first bolt might have gone straight through him. He waited for more noises, but there were none. The natural sounds of the cave began to creep back, the trickling of water and the distant rumble of the river. They were impressions that he would carry with him for ever, if he got out alive.

While he waited, Cooper tried to make sense of what he’d heard — the Coke bottle and the music, signs that a teenager had been there at the scene of Carol Proctor’s murder. He thought of the ten minutes that Sergeant Joe Cooper had been alone at the Quinns’ house, securing the scene. He was an observant man, so he’d have picked up the clues of another person’s presence in the house. There were some things you couldn’t help but notice.

Finally, Cooper decided it was safe to keep moving. He seemed to be crawling for a long time, but he had covered only a few yards. He sensed an obstruction in front of him and stopped again, feeling tentatively around the object. Illogically, his hopes rose. He thought at first that he’d somehow found his way back to the dummy of the ropemaker lying near the cavern entrance. But that would have meant he’d passed through the Orchestra Gallery and Lumbago Passage without noticing them.

Then logic took over and told him that if he was in the cavern entrance he would be able to see the light of the streetlamps in Riverside Walk.

But there was no light, only darkness. The body on the floor was too solid to be a dummy. And it wasn’t dust that leaked from its clothes, but blood.

Diane Fry hadn’t stopped being angry. The search team had reported the discovery of the dummy, the series of footprints going into the cavern, and the police-issue torch abandoned on the terrace. Armed officers had arrived, and they were heading further in, using caution, though now they at least had lights. Cave rescue were on their way, in case casualties needed to be recovered from the cavern. DI Hitchens had arrived, and DCI Kessen would be on the scene soon. It was no longer her responsibility.

A cheer went up from the team in the cavern entrance. The task force officers had succeeded in entering the ticket booth and locating the main control panel for the lighting. High on the cave walls the fibre-optics began to glow.

A short while later, Ben Cooper experienced a series of familiar sounds and movements — a swaying and tipping, the heavy breathing of effort and discomfort. The constriction was familiar, too. And the darkness, the occasional flash of light across the rock surface. And there was the constant trickle of water. Splashes of it landing on his face.

And at last, he felt a change in the temperature of the air, and heard a babble of voices and clatter of machinery filling a much larger space around him. The DCRO rescue party had brought him to the cavern entrance.

‘I bet you’re glad to be out in the daylight at last,’ someone said.

Cooper nodded, but couldn’t speak. He’d been so far into the darkness that the light hurt.

From the waiting room at Edendale General Hospital an hour later, Cooper made a call on his mobile to Bridge End Farm. He told Matt part of what had happened, and reassured him he was OK.

When he ended the call, he looked around the waiting room. There was no sign of him getting near the front of the queue yet. Gavin Murfin had set off to fetch him a cup of tea, but had been gone a long time. Cooper imagined he’d found a cafeteria and was putting away a quick pie and chips before he returned.

His next call was to Diane Fry.

‘How is Alistair Page? I mean, Alan Proctor?’

‘Dead,’ said Fry.

‘Damn.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Mansell Quinn?’

Fry’s voice lowered to little more than a whisper as she failed to hide her disappointment and tiredness.

‘We lost him.’

Cooper tried to sit up straight, but a jolt of pain shot through his ankle and up his leg.

‘Lost him? You’re kidding.’

‘I wish.’

‘Do you think he got out of the caves?’

‘I don’t see how, Ben. But if he did, he’ll turn up somewhere.’

‘There’s one other possibility. Maybe Neil Moss is about to have company.’

Formations, stals or pretties — those were the names the cavers gave to the calcite deposits in the caverns. Somewhere there might be cave pearls, the tiny calcite spheres lying in their own nests. Mansell Quinn remembered the petrified bird’s nest that his father had shown him, its eggs apparently turned to stone. But down here was real stone, millions of tons of it. No question of the slow smothering of new life. Here, life could be crushed in a moment.

He raised the light stick above his head and looked at the translucent yellow sheets covering the rock. Flowstone, they called it. Well, it might have flowed at some time, many thousands of years ago. But now it was solid and hard, flowing nowhere. If he chipped a lump out of the wall, would the remaining calcite flow over to fill the hole? Not in a million years. The hole would stay right where it was, and the broken lump would crumble in his hand. It hung in great, dead sheets in the darkness, untouched by the outside world. It was beyond the breathing.

Quinn stepped to the edge of the black void. He took hold of the crossbow by the butt and threw it into the darkness. It vanished from sight instantly, but took a long time to fall. He listened patiently to the silence until the weapon hit the water with a distant splash. Then the rucksack followed, and the waterproof, and the blood-stained shirt. He didn’t need them any more.